We want to believe

Perhaps technicalities are simply lost in translation. In the recent blockbuster Ra One, a gaming firm launches a game nobody has tried playing before, and – possibly because our Hindi film scripts are routinely typed out in English – instead of doing the sane thing and letting out a trial version that can be tweaked to perfection, the game designer decides to let his moppet-haired son play the game first. There has never, in my opinion, been a wronger reading of the words ‘beta version.’

Look, this isn’t an Indian thing. Most big-budget films, no matter where they are made, get technology very, very wrong. David Fincher’s exceptional The Social Network was lauded across Internet messageboards for merely getting a few words about PERL scripts right, because most other films – especially Hollywood’s increasingly illogical summer blockbusters – don’t even bother with fundamental correctness.

Eager not to confuse audiences with jargon, they decide instead to confuse them with gibberish, and, often enough, this works rather well. We gripe about flaws but, when push comes to shove in a film meant to be a spectacle, all we care about is how very big the push is and how impressively the film shoves – and not the mechanics behind the boom.

Which is why I find myself frequently befuddled by films which stake absolutely no claim towards plausibility spending interminable screen minutes trying to explain away what doesn’t make sense to begin with.

As I see it, there are two ways to go about explaining conveniently unrealistic tech in larger-than-life cinema: one is to thoroughly smokescreen the viewer with enough apparent plausibility to make him willfully surrender disbelief at the door – an approach Hollywood takes frequently, showing us inane ideas with such slickness and extreme detailing that we bite right in – and the other is to just state the preposterous as simply as possible and move on.

I’ve personally always found the latter to be a far more agreeable option. We know there’s a flux capacitor and that the DeLorean reaches timewarp velocity at 88mph, but we don’t know or care exactly how Doc Brown made it happen.

We know Arun Bhaiyya has a bracelet that makes him (and all his clothes) invisible, but we don’t know how his scientist father devised it. It’s an infinitely cleaner approach, allowing filmmakers to efficiently and briskly tell us the ground rules and invite us to indulge their flight of fancy. If their characters are well-etched and their narrative crackling, the audience is only too glad to believe. Heck, we go to the movies simply because we want to believe.

And while the smokescreen method does have its advantages – as demonstrated by umpteen Spielberg films and, most recently, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film which works mostly because of how fantastically well it entrances the viewer with nice-sounding details – it absolutely cannot be pulled off unless the film is conceptually strong.

There is a reason the best horror films, a genre that relies entirely on hokum, choose to dive right in and hit us with the rules and then spend all their precious screentime trying to scare the bejeezus out of us.

Ra One would have been a lot less insufferable without all the gobbledygook in the first half. And until we write big films that actually follow some kind of logic, I suggest we try not to waste time pretending they make sense.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own. The opinions and facts expressed here do not reflect the views of Mirror and Mirror does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.